But I've seen this play out in real life enough to know it happens. Note: I don't agree with any or support any of this. If "New Skype" is "enterprise communication support" in a corporate feature list (and not a real product filling a real need, as it used to be) then I can see how a broken or unusable Skype could still be a 'success' for Microsoft. If that gets delivered in a broken/unusable state, it's "ok" because the customer will never actually click that button anyway. It might be 'OK' to have a bunch of interns slap something together, if it only needs to be "real" enough to look pretty and look functional in a few demos or in a few specific happy-day cases.Īnalytics and Reporting is probably the most common example I've seen of this - it's not a bad feature on it's own, but companies will sometimes pay top dollar for it, even in places it makes no sense and/or will never get used. Yes, and depending on the enterprise, these "big features only there to justify high costs" may not actually be needed or useful or relevant. Typically these are not going to be things that make users' lives easier, they are going to be things that users may never see, like analytics and back-office integrations. > Then they must justify those costs with features that sound like they produce big values.
It's just that users never benefit from the improvements, because UX improvements are not thought to "move the needle." In actual fact, the vendor is locked into a Red Queen's Race with competing vendors, and is improving the software constantly. Like the "you are not the customer" problem above, this tends to create the illusion that the software sucks and that the vendor isn't improving it. Then they must justify those costs with features that sound like they produce big values. When you have to employ expensive salespeople, prepare proposals, apocryphally play golf with clients, or whatever, vendors must build those costs into the cost of the product.
Most users are not the software's customer, and therefore their needs are subordinate to the needs of the individuals and departments who are actually paying for it.Īs Spolsky famously pointed out, Enterprises forcibly impose an insane cost-of-sales on software vendors. With ad-driven products, we have painfully realized that if we aren't paying, we aren't the customer, and when something seems awful to us, the explanation often lies in the fact that the thing that is awful to us benefits the real customer, or perhaps that the thing that benefits us is of little value to the real customer compared to things that do not benefit us. Having spent my career working with Enterprises of one sort or another, here are a few off the top of my head:
Amusing, but the issues with Enterprise Software are far more complex than that.
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